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When did you realize the Prequels sucked?

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This has probably been covered before... but here-a-goes again (unless Moth3r merges it.)

1. Phantom Menace.  I worked at Barnes & Noble at the time so I got a chance to read the Terry Brooks novel a couple of weeks before the book was released and a solid month or two before the movie came out.  I think the promo material had me quite concerned (the title being revealed in fall of '98, I think was the first real danger sign I picked up on...) but the book convinced me of it.  I remember telling all of my friends at the time that the movie would suck.  They would just stare at me as if I had said that I believed the world was flat or that we actually landed on the moon in 1969.  I didn't end up seeing the movie for 2 years (long story!) and I didn't personally talk to anyone who had seen the movie for 5 months after it had come out.  I told those people (that had seen the movie) that it sucked and some of them agreed with me.  When I finally saw the movie, it amazed me that Jar Jar was not, as I had believed for 2+ years, the worst part of the movie.  I couldn't believe my eyes- I couldn't believe that Anakin took that cake with Yoda a close second.

2. Attack of the Clones. I saw this movie opening weekend with my wife.  I had read a one page summary six months prior which claimed to be real, but was too absurd, too stupid, and too *blech* to be the real thing.  It, unfortunately, was spot on- Dexter's Diner and Peggle the Lesser et al.  I can't remember one specific scene that told me that this movie was a stinker... I wanted it to be good and I had high hopes, if low expectations, going in.  The whole theatre laughed when Yoda drew his lightsabre.  I thought they were laughing for the same reason I was- the absurdity and wrongness of the scene.  Apparently, some of them told me later, they were laughing because they thought it was awesome.  My brother told me he thought AotC redeemed Phantom Menace.  Six months later, he refused to call it Star Wars and just called it Phantom Menace II.

3. Revenge of the Sith.  All of my hopes for a decent Star Wars prequel were then thrust onto the unwilling and uncapable shoulders of RotS.  The first 2 minutes were great!  Space battles!  Dogfighting!  And just when it looked like it was getting good-  Out come the cute Mickey Mouse droids which start dancing on Anakin's wing.  This went on for the next couple minutes.  I couldn't believe what I was seeing!  Surely I was asleep at home having midnight-pizza fed nightmares of Star Wars' last hope!  Then they landed in the hanger and I thought the rest of the movie could be good from then on.  Then R2 pulls a gun on the Super Battle Stooges (*Nyuck Nyuck*) and I rolled my eyes.  Maybe the movie could be good from there on out.  THEN the CG Chris Lee started morphing around the screen.  I gave up hope.  But then, near the middle of the film, I could feel the tension and strife in Anakin growing.  I thought: This could be GOOD!  Anakin was in Palpatines office trying to decide if he would side with him or with the Jedi.  I thought: FINALLY!  Here comes the fall of Anakin Skywalker!  I sat on the edge of my seat:
Palp: Join the Dark Side!
Ani: No!
Palp: Please?
Ani: Alright. (defeated) I will do what you say!
I was defeated.  Maybe the final lightsabre duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan will be good, I consoled myself.  And, of course, it was too over the top to connect emotionally.

So, that's when I knew each prequel sucked.  Except for Ewan MacGregor who was excellent.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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I was in denial the whole time, sadly. It never hit me - I didn't let it hit me - until well after the fact.

Until ROTS came out, I kept thinking This will all work, it's all going to fit, Episode III will fix everything. Lo and behold, come May 2005 and ROTS was history's most expensive PowerPoint.

Want to book yourself or a guest on THE VFP Show? PM me!

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I kept the faith right up to the moment the crawl finished crawling on TPM.

I was driven home in what can only be described as demonic fits of rage, 16 years of waiting for a crock of crap.

I felt like I'd been robbed by Anti-Claus.

When the AOTC posters came out and the clones were on the front I thought that it looked more like Star Wars at least... wrong...this time I wasn't as furious but I felt the sort of disappointment that usually comes from finding a kindly uncle has got drunk and piddled on your bed while you were in it. I know some people may like that sort of thing but I'm just a bit old fashioned when it comes to interrupted sleep.

ROTS, I must admit on first viewing gave me a bit of a buzz but when I saw it again the same flaws were there I was just too tired and world weary to notice them first time.

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vote_for_palpatine said:

I was in denial the whole time, sadly. It never hit me - I didn't let it hit me - until well after the fact.

Until ROTS came out, I kept thinking This will all work, it's all going to fit, Episode III will fix everything. Lo and behold, come May 2005 and ROTS was history's most expensive PowerPoint.

 LOL

Similar experience for me. I liked TPM at the time, thought AOTC was even better, and re-watched them quite a bit. I knew they weren't as good as the OT but it was exciting to have new SW films. I lost interest in them a bit by the time ROTS came out, but I loved ROTS and still consider it a pretty good movie. Looking back at the completed picture, however, and with the excitement off, more and more the films didn't hold up. AOTC especially fell apart. TPM I still enjoy as a children's fantasy film--which is the reason I think I liked it in the first place--but failed to hold up as a Star Wars film. I think it took the full trilogy to be seen before the massive failures of the first two films became totally apparent because I just kept telling myself ROTS would make them work somehow. As good as that film was, it made the previous ones seem worse, and it made it apparent that they weren't really necessary for understanding anything in it as well.

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I saw TPM in theaters probably six times. While I didn't like Jar Jar, and wished the film WASN'T a kid's adventure story, it was a fun kid's adventure and I liked it and the love of "Star Wars" kept me from worrying about many of it's basic storytelling flaws.

I saw AOTC once. Just never really had the impulse to see it again. I didn't think I HATED it right away, but the fact it failed as a love story and a mystery (both things I would have dug if it had succeeded) never sat right with me. If you had asked me I would have said it was a good flick, but perhaps that was just denial. Got the VHS for Christmas and watched it once or twice, but never really gave it much thought.

I still stand that ROTS was a pretty good flick, and had it been anything other than the climax to the greatest saga of film history, I think I would say it was damn good.

It was only after they all came out and some time passed that I got the general feeling of "that was extremely underwhelming."

It was when I first saw "The Phantom Edit" and for the first time really dug TPM as a movie, not just as"more Star Wars" that I started to see the major flaws in the stories that had kept me from really loving those movies.

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Episode III I finally felt duped.  The ironic thing about my fandom is I was actually a big PT gusher after TPM & AOTC.  The reason being that I felt Episode III was going to be the ultimate SW movie because of all the plot points that Lucas had saved up for it, and I also felt it would make TPM & AOTC better and in many way have them make more sense too.

Boy was I wrong!

I remember walking out of ROTS and kinda had an empty feeling like, "that was it???"  It started with the turn scene, and I remember thinking it was utterly ridiculous the moment I saw it on screen.  Then the final nail in the coffin was two scenes:

-The Duel on Mustafar.  I really thought this would be the mother of all lightsaber battles, and to be honest, it sucked!

-Padme losing the will to live and dying in childbirth.  All these years I kept dissecting Leias words from Jedi about her mother, does she go in hibernation with Leia?  Does she have to choose one of the children, and lets Luke go in a Sophie's Choice moment?  No, she fucking dies in childbirth and contradicts that scene in Jedi!

The finall straw was a week after I saw ROTS in the theater, I decided to watch the OT again Memorical Day Weekend, and after the circle was complete, I realized how much better the OT was.  The characters, the humor, the drama, even the real locations. 

I guess you could say Memorial Day 2005, I realized they sucked.

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TPM was part of my childhood-as a separate film I can stand it.

I saw AOTC, but after seeing it in an omnimax dome theater I realized that things were getting worse. If you thought it was bad before-try seeing it in that dome! The horror..

ROTS was one of the most depressing experiences I've ever had in a movie theater. Completely lackluster and boring. You go in knowing exactly what will happen, and there's just no way that they'll just let it unfold like a great slumbering mess is there? Oh wait; that's exactly what they did. That was just a bunch of "ohs" and "I guess this is where he gets the-yeah".

After this I gave up SW for some time. I would look around from time to time at all of my stuff and long for the SW of my childhood. What I wouldn't give for another release of the 97SE in theaters. (OOT would be better, but I'll take what I can get.) It wasn't until the GOUT and this site that I began to pick up the pieces of my shattered fandom. Geeky, I know.

If the the majority of what was added to the EU for the Prequels was added or substituted the result would be much better. These films do suck though. They really suck. As films, as Star Wars-as just anything. They're bad on all fronts and most criminally they are tepid and uninspired. They are the cartoonish tripe that critics accused the OT of being.

"The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner now I am the master.""Only a master of empty technique!"

The absolute moment I realized the degree of suckness was when I finally saw the original version of THX-1138 again. Episode II was made by the same guy? How can it be?

VADER!? WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOCHA LATTE? -Palpy on a very bad day.
“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader

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zombie84 said:


Similar experience for me. I liked TPM at the time, thought AOTC was even better, and re-watched them quite a bit. I knew they weren't as good as the OT but it was exciting to have new SW films. I lost interest in them a bit by the time ROTS came out, but I loved ROTS and still consider it a pretty good movie. Looking back at the completed picture, however, and with the excitement off, more and more the films didn't hold up. AOTC especially fell apart. TPM I still enjoy as a children's fantasy film--which is the reason I think I liked it in the first place--but failed to hold up as a Star Wars film. I think it took the full trilogy to be seen before the massive failures of the first two films became totally apparent because I just kept telling myself ROTS would make them work somehow. As good as that film was, it made the previous ones seem worse, and it made it apparent that they weren't really necessary for understanding anything in it as well.

Same here, almost exactly.

I really only realized the flaws in the PT/SE after you guys tore them up for me every day. ;-)

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When RLM tied me up in his basement and made me watch them without pizza rolls. :-(

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I always knew they were sub par, but when they were put on a pedestal by Lucas who can release them but not the OOT, it made me hate them. I also started to hate them because they made the EU a big chunk of utter crap. And they turned the fan base into a bunch of Yoda quoting nerds.

I was a Star Wars nerd in the 90's, but the PT made me identify myself as a fan of the original originals. You really have to love them all to be classified as a Star Wars nerd nowadays.

I also realized I wasn't a Star Wars nerd anymore, when conversations with Star Wars nerds became a frustrating argument. I can't sit with today's Star Wars nerds and be one myself. The last time I did, they sounded like that bald guy in the People Vs George Lucas trailer "Mr. George Lucas, we the fans (the TRUE fans), salute you!!!"

I can hang out with you guys all day, because you have seen the good ones in their original glory.

Another instance of me hating the PT, was when I started making DVD covers. Try finding good images of the OT without having to go through pages of prequel crap.

"The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s to go back and reinvent a movie." - George Lucas

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It's funny- it sounds like all of us gave the prequels every chance.  Even though I was pretty sour about TPM and AotC going into RotS... I still hoped deep in my heart that RotS would somehow make the other two make sense.

At the very least, I was curious how the whole Sifo Dias thing was going to shake out.  They didn't even take care of that!

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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doubleofive said:


Same here, almost exactly.

I really only realized the flaws in the PT/SE after you guys tore them up for me every day. ;-)

 Glad we could help you out there.  Did you take the info we gave you and convince your wife?  Or did she already know how much they sucked?

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

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doubleofive said:

 

zombie84 said:


Similar experience for me. I liked TPM at the time, thought AOTC was even better, and re-watched them quite a bit. I knew they weren't as good as the OT but it was exciting to have new SW films. I lost interest in them a bit by the time ROTS came out, but I loved ROTS and still consider it a pretty good movie. Looking back at the completed picture, however, and with the excitement off, more and more the films didn't hold up. AOTC especially fell apart. TPM I still enjoy as a children's fantasy film--which is the reason I think I liked it in the first place--but failed to hold up as a Star Wars film. I think it took the full trilogy to be seen before the massive failures of the first two films became totally apparent because I just kept telling myself ROTS would make them work somehow. As good as that film was, it made the previous ones seem worse, and it made it apparent that they weren't really necessary for understanding anything in it as well.

Same here, almost exactly

 

And here. Except I'm going to forget that nothing happened and never gonna see them again.

And in the time of greatest despair, there shall come a savior, and he shall be known as the Son of the Suns.

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xhonzi said:



doubleofive said:

Same here, almost exactly.

I really only realized the flaws in the PT/SE after you guys tore them up for me every day. ;-)




 Glad we could help you out there.  Did you take the info we gave you and convince your wife?  Or did she already know how much they sucked?

I think she already knew. She actually likes TPM, except for the pod race.

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after seeing the trailers and commercials for The Phantom Menace it was enough for me to stay away. i never had the intention of renting it or anything i was so turned off. but eventually i had acquired the VHS tape as a gift and my suspicions were confirmed.

this was not genuine Star Wars.

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I'm a bit like captainsolo -

went to a TPM screening in early October 1999, just when it was starting to run in our local cinemas, as part of my 11th birthday present. I couldn't remember the day when I first watched Star Wars, but it's one of my oldest childhood memories and I was hyped about the movie. My parents were also fans of the OT. I loved the movie... they didn't. When I asked why, they politely explained I would understand when I grow up and let it rest - as did I.

I know it's a bad movie, but I somehow like it. It has a childish charm to it and it's visually/aesthetically closer to the OT, for some strange reason.

Can't remember much about how I felt for AotC, as I had an eye exam scheduled after the movie and I was psyched - I knew that I was shortsighted, but my friends and family didn't -I was supposed to go with my father after the movie (turned out wearing glasses ain't so bad after all ;) ). What I do remember was that my father was becoming increasingly sad and angry during the screening; oh, yes. and the Yoda laughter. I think he was going to cry at the moment.

After I got home in the evening and decided to play my brand new "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast" (crystal clear with glasses, even) I had the terrible realization that the game was a far superior Star Wars story than the movie I had just watched.

 By the time RotS rolled out in May 2005 I had begun hating the prequels. While I grew up in the '90s most of the neighborhood kids and my schoolmates not only hadn't watched Star Wars, but they bashed it constantly. I felt awful being a fan of the incredible and much-hated Saga. After the prequels came out, almost everyone became a raging nerd. Not only that, at every pace through my high-school years I was listening how awful the OT was and how amazingly "cool, visually stunning" the prequels were - of course, no one ever spoke about characterization, drama or plot. Just fancy CGI.

 So, back to the premier of RotS - many of my friends, my father and uncle (who barely agreed to come after the first two prequels) preparing for the midnight screening. It began OK, space battle... and after the first two minutes, when instead of dazzling dogfights and story/choreography behind the battle, it turned into a CGI fest of stupid droids and a pointless melee of ships (one that didn't end properly even) I knew would be the same trash!

 After the credits rolled, one my best friends - and huge prequel fan - turned and said '"they killed Star Wars. I'm going home to sleep, forget this .... and never watch it again".

nterestingly, my mother saw the movie later in 2007 and loved it - although she couldn't stand AotC.

I had pretty much given up on anything Star Wars until I found some great fan edit and this website.  And realy, really wanted the prequels to be great. Looking back, I'm more sad about ho much time wasted anticipated them than for the fact they turned out to be awful.

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At first, I didn't dislike the prequels as much as many people did, finding them average films with some good moments: I think the excitement of seeing Star Wars in the theaters after so many years painted over many cracks.  Nonetheless, I found TPM plot really confusing in the cinema, but I just supposed I had missed something lol. 

I hated the excessive use of CGI and lightsabers from the start, and said at the time that I wished that the prequels had used models and tried to recreate the look of the OT.  If the style had been deliberately retro I would have been overjoyed.  

I am ashamed to say it took repeat vewings for me to realize how bad the prequels were, and I didn't notice some plotholes till I saw RLM's reviews, which have really been the nail in the coffin for me.  Until then, I was still hoping for fanedits to solve certain problems, but now I must join the ranks of those who reject the PT, and will have to leave what happened before the OT to my imagination, which might ultimately be for the best.

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When the credits rolled on AOTC.

:-(

(To be clear, that's when I realized AOTC sucked.  TPM rules!)

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Ric Olie said:

When the credits rolled on AOTC.

:-(

(To be clear, that's when I realized AOTC sucked.  TPM rules!)

I admit it can be a guilty pleasure. I watch it for 2 things: You and Darth Maul.

 

"The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won’t last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you’ll be able to project it on a 20’ by 40’ screen with perfect quality. I think it’s the director’s prerogative, not the studio’s to go back and reinvent a movie." - George Lucas

<span> </span>

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EyeShotFirst said:

Ric Olie said:

When the credits rolled on AOTC.

:-(

(To be clear, that's when I realized AOTC sucked.  TPM rules!)

I admit it can be a guilty pleasure. I watch it for 2 things: You and Darth Maul.

Thanks dude!  And I have to admit Maul is pretty bad-ass, though I'd like to see him twirl his pansy light swords around right before I squash him with my ship.

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I'll go with Fishman that my actual hostility (as opposed to mere disapointment) with the PT formed from the OT being buried by the boss. That's also when I stopped thinking the SE was cool.

"He gives us this crap, then takes away what we love!?!?"

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So... are a lot of you saying that you hate the prequels because the O-OT was never released on DVD?

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!